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climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote,
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be."

The public expectations of software are not particularly rigorous -- it shouldn't crash too often, it should look moderately pretty, and it should get them on the web. Done, done, and done. Can we go back to arguing and tribalism now?

I had some doubts about the numbers (largely because the percentage of Gnome code contributions goes back to well before canonical existed). I had hoped for a refutation with numbers (i.e.g we have x Gnome devs working for us, who have made y commits and z loc).

Gnome is important because Canonical's excuse for not contributing to the kernel was that they were contributing to the front end.

Mark Shuttleworth is spinning like a politician (with calls to emotion rather than facts).

Back when Ubuntu started, Canonical contributed nothing to Gnome, the highest profile "Gnome community" members it hired was not a real developer but more of a professional narcissist employed to accumulating credit for the company. Also, Ubuntu manages to take the bulk of its packages from Debian without crediting it which has infuriated many people from that community also.
However, Ubuntu does what it does well, it provides a fully configured and ready to run desktop. And it is for that reason that I use

As soon as you enter Congress, you are no longer allowed to belong to any party. You become one single whole group, with no allegiances to anything but your own personal beliefs, your voters back home, and the Law.

Tribalism is not just what makes large software projects difficult. It is quite literally the cause of almost all of mankind's problems. Everything, from street corner graffiti to civilization threatening global warming can be tracked back to tribalism.

Yeah, stupid socialism. It doesn't work anywhere except everywhere except America. Oh, and here too, but not for health care or higher education. Socialism is only for the Department of War^wDefense, Libraries, and the Fire Department. Everything else is slavery. I mean servitude. It's confusing because I'm talking about slavery, but using the word servitude because slavery has these negative connotations which are directly attributable to unregulated socialism. I mean capitalism.

Sorry. You seem to be mistaking socialism for the economic side of communism. Socialism is simply the idea that the public, either in the form of the government or directly in the form of a group of citizens, should own things, provide services, etc. Publicly owned transportation, water and firefighting infrastructure are all examples of socialism. Not "solid principles of government" whatever that is.

First, 'communism' is an ideal like 100% laissez-faire pure ideal capitalism. So there were no true communistic countries. So the phrase 'the economic side of communism' does not really mean what you think it means. As ideals go, communism is OK (personally, I'd like to live in a communist world). Of course, communism turned out to be perfectly unachievable in the real world:)

Next, the word 'socialism' is waaaay overburdened. It can mean USSR-style command economy OR it can mean a fo

You're making that up. There is nothing, certainly not in the modern usage, in the term socialism that indicates it must be applied to EVERYTHING. Modern economies are always (at least I can't think of an exception, and that includes the US) a mixture of socialist and capitalist economic models with some economies incorporating more socialism and others more capitalism.

Americans do have an awfully warped idea of what socialism is, and do their very best to deny that there's even a possibility they could h

The problem is that we've spent several generations in America being taught that there's only one type of Socialism and it was part of the international Communist conspiracy. Even after the fall of the Evil Empire, we're still stuck with a legacy of distrusting anything that even hints at socialism or socialized programs.

"1 : any of various economic and political theories...""2 a : a system of society or group living in which...""3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory..."

So it's either some kind of economic or political theory, a system of society or group, or a society stage in a theory from Marx. No sir, it doesn't say anywhere on the text you bring up to attention that it is any kind of government.

Since ceoyoyo in the grandparent post explicitly says that "Socialism is simply the idea that the public, either in the form of the government or directly in the form of a group of citizens, should own things, provide services, etc." which is basically a mix up of your references "1" and "2 a" it's clear that, within the limits of this discussion, ceoyoyo is right and ffreeloader is wrong.

If you can figure out how to convince people to reject tribalism and operate in a completely rational manner then promoting free and open software will end up being small potatoes, you've probably got a nobel prize waiting for you.

This. I used up all of my mod points yesterday, but this is the real issue. Some people are just selfish and will twist things to their own benefit, even if the cost is greater to the other person or people. People get killed over $5 during a mugging. Surely any rational actor would think that $5 is not worth the other guys life or the risk of getting thrown in prison... and yet it still happens.

If you can figure out how to convince people to reject tribalism and operate in a completely rational manner

I've found the best method is to involve family. I've known people who were racist but once their brother or sister was dating someone of that race, they broadened their view a little bit. It's usually a slow process, but it helps them get past skin colour once they get to know the individual personally. Which tends to happen at a lot of family functions.

So - Mister Shuttleworth, if you can get your sleek and graceful Ubuntu women to date some strong and burly Red hat men, you'll find this kind of tribalism slowly disappear.

Strange how he speaks of "lifting Free Software to the forefront", whilst all he's _really_ doing is trying to lift Ubuntu to the forefront.

Mr. Shuttleworth apparently knows that "the internet doesn't forget", yet he (I assume it was him who heralded the changes made) chose to tone down the role of Free (as in freedom) Software in the "Ubuntu Promise" over the years in a very silent yet continuous manner, and led Ubuntu to act against some of the principles of the early (think 2004 to 2006 or so) days of the project; principles that I happen to value. Getting into bed with vendors of proprietary software in a way that doesn't benefit others in the Free Software eco-system is something I despise, for example: Canonical is actually getting proprietary AMD/ATI graphics drivers before anyone else gets them, probably under NDA or whatnot. I also don't like their "partner"-repository that contains nothing but proprietary software, and is advertised and presented as a Really Great Thing(tm), not as a sometimes (probably) necessary evil. I don't like how Ubuntu's more and more about doing "their thing" without contributing back to the upstream projects they base their product on, and how they actually try to differentiate themselves from their competitors by making technically bad decisions in the wake of all this (think client-side window decorations, and putting window controls to the left because of that - just doesn't make any sense to me). There were many other occasions on which Mr. Shuttleworth and Ubuntu chose to somehow, somewhat upset parts of the Free Software community, either by what they stated or what they did. I just don't think Mr. Shuttleworth is entitled to put Ubuntu under the banner of Free Software, at least not as it stands today. If someone on identi.ca, or whereever else, is arguing against Ubuntu, it's just that: someone arguing against Ubuntu. It's certainly not an attack on Free Software.

Unfortunately, he's essentially killed the Debian project, and the rest of Free Software is not far behind as we realize the futility of making ourselves his unpaid employees. I have a large product I'm working on, originally intended to be Open Source licensed. I am now thinking about a commercial-distribution-hostile license, just to make sure that community comes first.

So the developers left the project for better money and it's his fault for offering them jobs? Fascinating!

You're not helping your case. Is it so hard to point out what the evil was in offering money for jobs? Was the SABDFL all evil like and cackling when he said "Help me DOOM Debian and you'll get 30 silver coins each! BWAHAAHAHA"?

I doubt that very many Debian developers are actually working at Ubuntu. It's not that big a company. They're working in lots of places. It wasn't throwing money at developers, mostly at users through marketing, PR and publicity.

I've used both, and other distros, and other Unixes. I don't keep on using Ubuntu just because their leaflets and CDs are shinier. I keep using it because it has less hassles, less fanbois and is more usable.

Not wasting a weekend configuring shit because it already works is a freedom.

Not finding fanbois ready to discuss that "apt is better than rpm, therefore your not debian distro sucks" for hours is a freedom.

Downloading an iso with easy instructions from a polished website, or actually having a CD come t

Stupid committees deciding to choose names like "iceweasel" to backstab firefox tried very hard to kill Debian from within but failed. Neither Canonical or Shuttleworth are going to be able to inflict as much damage to Debian as that. With respect to your undoubted abilities you are really overstating the case here to the point of misleading others into the sort of stupid tribalism the article is about.Your statement makes even less sense than saying something like "knoppix killed debian".

I understand what you are getting at in a glance because I used Debian for years. But would the average person understand it? Let alone be able to do that right. Even knowing stuff, it sometimes would take a day to get a machine settled again after doing an upgrade (all sorts of little things would go wrong with fonts or audio or multi-screen support or whatever). Which is why we use Macs now. My wife switched first. Then I did about a year later. Am I hap

Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers. It's a matter of their profits coming before principle. It's going to be the same, IMO, for any for-profit distribution - you have to consider that they are in this to operate a profitable company, not to do good for the world. We really should have done something about it before Red Hat became a Billion dollar company, and Ubuntu is no different given Mark's capi

Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers. It's a matter of their profits coming before principle.

So then fork Ubuntu and create your own project. Hell, take Ubuntus changes and roll 'em back into Debian and create Debian Desktop. Voila, the cross-pollination enabled by open source works again.

Seriously, you just sound like you're suffering from sour grapes. You aren't getting yours, so Ubuntu must be e

RMS expects folks to understand the merits of Free Software a priori. I am very fond of Richard but it's necessary to accept that his mental wiring does not give him any empathy for folks who don't think the way he does. So, Open Source is a way to introduce the benefits of Free Software to people who don't think like Richard. This makes it necessary, of course, for those people to take the second step on their own: we hope that a pragmatic appreciation leads to a philosophical one.

I have run Debian "unstable" for 12 years and only had one downtime day because of it. Its quality is pretty close to that of a released distribution. And it is updated daily. Perhaps the failure was that Debian didn't market it.

Ubuntu is bringing free software to the masses as noone else has done before. Nobody forces you to install proprietary software from the partner repository or anywhere else and when Ubuntu detects that a proprietary driver, for instance, is available for your hardware it tells you that it's not free software and you can choose to ignore and keep using the free one.

I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.

The goals of the user should be paramount, not the developer; once you release the code under a suitable GPL, you relinquish a level of control over how that software moves through the ecosystem (keeping only what the license allows you).

The problem with the user being paramount is that there is often no quid-pro-quo whatsoever with the user. Of course they don't pay us. They don't contribute to the project. They don't help us when we ask for political lobbying against things that hurt us.

If you want quid pro quo, then I do think you're restricted to either making commercial software or just hiring out your services. You're asking users to pay a price that would actually be higher in many cases than commercial software. They should not

It's going to be difficult to balance but I'd like to work on it. It is not desirable to restrict distribution for a reasonable fee or support that supports the whole community, even if paid or sponsored. There'd have to be more thought on what makes the gate-keepers harmful. But I can think of a number of problems to be addressed:

The fact that when we go to lobby our users on issues important to us, they don't know us, they know Red Hat or Ubuntu even when we really wrote their software. Red Hat or Ubuntu get to form their opinions. It's a distance that is harmful to us.

Contrast this to the fact that generation 1 Free Software projects were often user-hostile, at least as the users saw it. That is something that Ubuntu has been more successful with than us, and we must fix that.

Proprietary device drivers should clearly not be allowed, to the extent that we can enforce that with contract or copyright law.

The lack of help from distributions on issues like software patenting that are important to Free Software is frustrating.

It just takes one Ubuntu sympathizer or PR flack to minus-moderate any comment. Unfortunately, once PR agencies and so on started paying people to moderate online communities, and to have hundreds of accounts each, things changed.

I have been offered the online-perception-management services I'm talking about while managing at HP and Sourcelabs. If you are not aware of companys concern for their online perception and what they do about it, and won't take my word for it, there isn't much point in arguing about it with you.

Mark's hypocracy doesn't have so much to do with his character as it has to do with the fact that his company's goals and those of the free software community are simply not compatible. If you consider how different they are, I shouldn't have to argue this one. What made his statement hypocritical is that he was asking the Free Software community to all line up and pull in one direction, with the effect that Ubuntu would be able to harvest more of our software for its own purposes. It's not really anything for the community's own good - we need our differences.

I have been offered the online-perception-management services I'm talking about while managing at HP and Sourcelabs.

So, because you have been offered such services, every time you are modded down on slashdot, it must be because of paid PR agents doing it, and Shuttleworth is paying them to do it? Get a grip.

What made his statement hypocritical is that he was asking the Free Software community to all line up and pull in one direction,

But he doesn't say that. In fact, he says quite the opposite. You seem to be a perfect example of the destructive "tribalism" he's talking about - somebody who instantly dismisses different opinions, simply because of the group they are associated with.

It's not really anything for the community's own good - we need our differences.

Only 52 comments in and it seems there is already a disproportionate number of posts moderated Offtopic, Troll, or Flamebait than a typical/. thread. All this and we're just talking about the possibility of tribalism being a problem in the free software community. Perhaps Mr. Shuttleworth is on to something.

A friend and I have recently been discussing tribalism and an idea he called Monkeysphere - I'll quote him here more-or-less verbatim as he's already written it beautifully:

It's [Monkeysphere] a brilliant concept. It came about when researchers noticed a correlation between primate brain sizes (I forget whether it was the whole brain or a key part of it) and the size of their social groups. It was such a strong correlation that they could actually predict how big a group it would be when presented with a brain they hadn't seen before. This group limit has been termed the Monkeysphere.

One day they were given a rather large brain, and guessed a social group size of 150. You might already have guessed which species this brain came from.

Basically, we cannot cope with the idea of more than 150 people - at least, not AS people. We blur the others out. The supermarketcheckouts may as well be staffed by robots for all we care. There are human beings taking away our rubbish every morning, but we don't even think about them. All we think about is the rubbish going out, and then disappearing. Road rage? We simply don't see other drivers as people.

We *have* to work this way, or we'd go mad.

Stereotypes? Racism? That's the Monkeysphere at work. It's much easier to think of a million people far away if we think of them all as the*same* person.

Now apply this logic to any community. Once the community gets big enough (such as in the Free Software world), it essentially divides into such tribes and you wind up with exactly what Shuttleworth's describing.

The sad thing is, if this Monkeysphere idea is accurate, I don't see how such tribalism in the F/OSS world is avoidable. Indeed, it'll only get worse as more organisations jump on the bandwagon.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with him, but for perspective, contrast with with Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, and "Beyond Civilization":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)#New_Tribalist_Movement [wikipedia.org]http://books.google.com/books?id=bHP9ztHuWmwC [google.com]"With the publication of his trilogy of novels (Ishmael; The Story of B; My Ishmael), Quinn became something of a cult figure in visionary fiction. In those books, Quinn explored the self-sustaining nature of tribal societies and his belief that the current worldwide ecological and economic crises are due to the agriculture-based organization of civilized societies. He now turns his hand to nonfiction, with an appeal for universal renewal through a "New Tribal Revolution." Acknowledging that it would be impossible for most civilized humans to return to the hunting and gathering typical of tribes, Quinn argues that modern men and women need to invent a completely different mode of existence. To do this, they must question a basic assumption of all civilized societies: "Civilization must continue at any cost and must not be abandoned under any circumstances." Quinn, borrowing from Richard Dawkins, calls this assumption a "meme," the cultural equivalent of a gene. Quinn's main examples are peoples like the Maya and Anasazi, who returned to tribalism after unsuccessful attempts at other types of social organization, and the communal structure of traditional circuses. The author has a knack for stating the obvious with tremendous personal conviction. His articulation of a simpler way of life will appeal to those made frantic by globalization and all the forces conspiring to make people dance as fast as they can. (Oct.) "

It is a problem. Tribalism is different than debate, dissent, and competition. It's a state of being unable to engage in meaningful debate or to accept constructive criticism. There is (or should be) a middle ground between a "mono-culture" and the inability to accept new ideas from a member of an opposing group.

Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.

I wonder why that is?

That's easy to explain. Much like how the grass is always greener on the other side, criticism is louder when it's against your side.

How appropriate considering the topic at hand of Tribalism.

I would love to see these Tea Party guys share in some of the power to see if they live up to their claims. And Libertarians. And Greens. If the stranglehold of the two corrupt powerhouses were to be shaken with some decent 3rd party action without the populace mourning "wasting" votes within my lifetime, I can die a happy man that that the country I love will be on it's way to rediscovering her path.

This type of action by Bush was the reason his approval numbers were so low - he lost his conservative base. Conservatives were quite outspoken about this. That being said, the fiscal bailout was quite different from the "stimulus" package. The fiscal bailout was almost completely a set of loans and the large majority of those loans have been repaid. The "stimulus" package, on the other hand was mostly a giant boatload of pork-barrel spending.

I posted often and frequently that the Bailout Bill was stupid, and that I was happy the Republicans voted it down. Then the Republicans turned-around and voted for the second, revised bill Nancy Pelosi came-up with, and I started calling them Bastards instead of Republicans. And then I joined a Tea Party in December of '08. It's not my fault you chose not to hear my voice. You also chose not to hear my voice in 9/12 when I said going to war was a dumbass decision, but was passed near-unanimously by the Congress (both D's and R's).

Oh and by the way the Tea Parties date back to December 2007 when Bush was still in office. It was originally started by libertarian Ron Paul, who then stepped aside after his campaign was finished, but the momentum continued without him.

"I posted often and frequently that the Bailout Bill was stupid, and that I was happy the Republicans voted it down. Then the Republicans turned-around and voted for the second, revised bill Nancy Pelosi came-up with, and I started calling them Bastards instead of Republicans."

Except that without the bailout you'd probably be out of the job, without unemployment benefits and in the middle of The Greatest Depression Ever. And I'm not exaggerating a bit. Without the bailout money the banking system would have

If Wall Street speculators can gamble away the world so badly that it leads to the worlds worst depression ever, then the system already is so rotten from within that bailout money will only prolong the suffering.

Offtopic, but I was hoping to ask a few questions to an intelligent, rational member of the Tea Party. I'm assuming you qualify, since you are a member of this tribe -- and of course our tribe is very intelligent and rational.:)

A big chunk of the Tea Party platform is adherence to The Constitution and Bill of Rights. I am a studious and zealous fan of those documents. I think their underlying principles, particularly in The Bill of Rights, are surprisingly prescient and noble.

No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.

I have no problem with not taxing people who don't have health insurance, as long as (1) they receive no medical care they do not pay for up-front, including ambulance corps/first responders and (2) they are permanently not eligible for public health care (including medicare).

Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.

Oh, and by the way -- random capitalization and the co-opting of terms with specific other meanings just makes you look like a lunatic. Might be one of the reasons many of us consider you to generally be trolling.

I've got almost half a million in the bank, and can easily afford to pay my own bills, thank you very much.

You're still playing the lottery, pal. There are plenty of diseases and injuries that could eat that half million in just a fraction of the time it took you to collect it. Multiplied by the number of people in your family. Know how I know? I *used* to have a seven figure bank account, that's how. I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.

And... frankly... if you've got 500k in the bank, I don't even care to hear you whine about a $900 tax delta, regardless of the reason. You discredit yourself instantly. Buy some bloody insurance, they won't charge you the tax, you get great value for your money.

You've been lucky, and you aren't thinking about the possibilities, you're really not. My father also had a pacemaker, but he also suffered total renal failure and was on peritoneal dialysis. Very expensive process, and he was on it 'til the day he died. Fortunately, that's one of the very, very few conditions for which Medicare will pick up the costs no matter what your age (he died fairly young.) He was also on a drug that, at the time (this was almost two decades ago) cost about $15,000 year

I've got almost half a million in the bank, and can easily afford to pay my own bills, thank you very much.

Just wanted to let you know, if you blow through that because of unexpected medical bills (high probability, plenty of people with a hell of a lot more money than you have gone bankrupt because of it), I don't mind my tax dollars supporting your medicaid and emergency services. I mean, I think you're wrong, and shortsighted, but I don't want you to die because of that mistake. Peace.

No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.

Oh, so you want me to pay to keep the emergency rooms open, so you can use them when you get in a car accident and need them? That "fine" is a fee to keep the hospitals open, so that when you need them they'll still be there. The current situation is that you, and people like you, are opting out of the health insurance market but still expect the emergency rooms to remain on standby, which is why hospitals are going out of business and health insurance companies keep having to raise rates.

Well of course private insurance companies are a scam, and are designed to extract the most money from people at the most vulnerable times in their lives. The better solution is to make healthcare infrastructure a public good, just like firefighters and police.

Unfortunately Joe frickin' Lieberman killed that idea back in September, when he killed the public option. So we don't get to have nice things like low-cost pharmaceuticals, or hospitals who don't have to employ twice as many insurance reps as doctors

He didn't seem at all to be saying there should be a mono-culture. He stated that it was a problem that people in each individual clique seem to often, rather than being cooperative and working with the other groups (or even respecting) them, things tend to devolve into "my is better than yours!" attitudes. It's not even always between distributions. At a recent open sources convention I attended, though it wasn't really open hostility, I saw a lot more devotion and mild animosity between Gnome and KDE users than between Ubuntu and Fedora users.

For a year I used Kubuntu, as well as the Linux Mint version based on it, for my workstation. I switched because KDE on Debian, of which I'm a big fan, had become so unstable in the spring of 2009 as KDE4 was being introduced. I'm grateful to Mr. Shuttleworth that I had this option. I was forced to move back to Debian because there are currently too many bugs in the Ubuntu packages that I need to support a distributed file system based on Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS. This all works with Debian (lenny or squeeze), so I figure Ubuntu is just too focused on the desktop to care about it.

That's a pity for two reasons. First, I definitely had it easy for a while as far as the desktop is concerned. I've been back with Debian for a month now and there are still a number of rough edges to my desktop experience: I've spent far too much time adding missing functionality and trying to get it all to behave properly. It's such a waste of effort when you know that it doesn't have to be like that anymore. Linux Mint is so easy, even a relative noob can install it and have all kinds of basic desktop functionality running and configured in just a few hours.

The second reason is because Linux workstations deserve better file server support than just NFS and SMB/CIFS. Imagine an office building that will soon house 2.000 employees and being offered the opportunity to set it up with workstations and servers using only open source software. Would you feel comfortable doing that with NFS or Samba? I wouldn't. OpenAFS, on the other hand -- now that's a capable file system. I know that I would be able to rely on Debian and OpenAFS for the file servers, but I would also prefer a distro for the workstations that would likely result in the lowest number of help desk calls. I doubt that would be Debian, but it would be great if it could be something based on Debian. With OpenAFS and distros like Ubuntu, I figure we're almost there.

From this perspective, I find it really strange that so many long-time Debian users can be so hostile towards Ubuntu. It's not like anyone is forcing them to use it. IMHO, if it's so easy to use that it not only gives normal users the necessary confidence to make the switch from Windows, but also to fix (most of) their own problems afterwards, how can that be a bad thing? Furthermore, if the Ubuntu project continues to succeed where the Debian project has not, perhaps the latter should look to the former for a little inspiration every once in a while.

Yeah except that whole part about making Linux easier to use, and accessable to average users. Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it.

It may not be the distro for you, but to dismiss it as adding very little to the OSS community is intellecutally dishonest. Ubuntu was very helpful to many people for getting started on Linux. I myself started using it a year ago, and recently switched to Arch Linux because I was ready to learn more about how the sytem works. Ubuntu opened the door, and I'm very greatful for that.

Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it.

What many people don't realize is that this is true for advanced users as well. I know the intricate details of Linux, but don't want to be bothered by them, so I choose to use Ubuntu.

It's the same thing with programming languages. I have programmed in C for over 25 years, but I use Python for many jobs. Having a simpler language to program makes my work more productive for day to day tasks, although I can resort to C whenever Python isn't powerful enough.

paid kernel devs, like redhat and suse. Getting hardware vendors on board, like suse and redhat. Getting 3rd party software(like oracle) on board.

Basicly something other than the closed launch pad, and some shiny guis for config files. (that work fine if you are on close to standard OEM desktops, but heaven forbid you have a hardware raid controller and want to run LVM or NFS on/.)

Redhat didn't enter the ring with Canonical over their contributions, that's entirely the wrong way to look at the situation. Canonical just can't seem to figure out why it's them verses everyone else. Canonical's all keen to wax philosophical about tribes, while the "tribes of old" so to speak have more or less met in the middle, broken bread and made up.

You see, what Canonical is now realizing is that they're in a tribe all by themselves. And they can't handle this revelation becoming public, because it really shows just how little they've contributed back to the community over the past few years. This recent GNOME survey just shows how little they've done for GNOME. The Linux Kernel survey showed much the same numbers. And if we ran around to the rest of the big free software communities, I'm certain we'd see much the same numbers, yet again.

Canonical, with its Secret Invite-only Design Team e.g., has built a nice big brick wall around themselves, doing lots of work within, but very little escaping at the border. They try to say they're doing "Upstream Desktop Software" work with things like Notify-OSD and their indicator mess, but both are so incredibly bad that no other operating system is using them, and their patches have been entirely rejected likewise. (Namely due to the absolute poor quality of the patches. I've reviewed a number of them myself, and in almost every case they break some of the software's functionality so that they can integrate their junk, which absolutely won't work outside of Ubuntu's environment. That shit wouldn't fly anywhere else, but they're Canonical, so we should merge their patch anyways, right?)

Furthermore, they knew this was going to happen from the outlay; their upstreams set out visions, had meetings, and collectively decided as a community "We're going this way". Canonical then chooses to go an entirely different direction, and are pissed that nobody followed them.

So yeah, they can whine until the cows come home about how people "fight with them", but until they prove themselves to be members of the community at broad and not members of their own kingdom, nobody is going to take them seriously. The big wars are over; GNOME and KDE have reconciled their differences and are working together. Vi vs Emacs is a funny anecdote for/. conversations. Now Canonical needs to decide if it wants a future with the community, or not.

You have it backwards. Triablism is the opposite of competition. Tribalism isn't "I prefer my project so I will make it better than yours" it's "You are an idiot, why bother competing when I'm already better and always will be". It's not "I like this feature we should do that too" it's "That feature is in Windows, it's garbage, lets not even think about it!"